The Canterbury Tales project was proposed as a performative exploration of the city. It took the opportunity during this extraordinary time in Christchurch’s history, to consider notions of place in city-making, and how it is that the community might feed into the process of the city-becoming. The extraordinary success of Luxcity for FESTA in 2012 illustrated the desire of the Christchurch community to re-engage with their place, many coming back into the city for the first time since the February 22 earthquake.

While the Luxcity installations lit up the dynamic post-earthquake landscape, the audience brought with them both memory and desire – a remembering of what was and a projection of what might be in the many places and spaces that surrounded the event area. In this way, the event highlighted that no space is empty or vacant, it is alive with lived experience and the hopes of its community, the past, present and future inextricably linked – and it is this largely intangible experience that lies at the heart of creating a sense of place that is inclusive and engaging.

Building on this success, Canterbury Tales was designed to engage much more with specific notions of place, with local performance groups, artists and businesses representing diverse backgrounds and disciplines, collaborating with architectural, design, scenography and performance students from around Australasia. Together they created site-specific explorations of urbanism that spoke to local and international concerns regarding public space that is inclusive and interactive with the transitional nature of urban communities. The economic and environmental challenges faced by global communities mean a necessary re-thinking of the way we live together and this requires examining how it is that cities perform, how the communities within them interact, the rituals that bring them together and around which we can build sustainable, exciting places to live and work.

While these questions are heightened within the current Christchurch situation, there are many conversations happening internationally that can both inform and be informed by what is happening here in Christchurch.

The river that runs through the centre of this particular city is a vital touchstone and a place around which to develop a conversation. It is the predominant physical feature in relation to which diverse communities have established a sense of place. Both as a permanent physical feature and as a metaphor for the reality of a life that is never fixed but always moving and changing, the river provides an important point to reflect and comment on what is happening here in this place at this time.

At the heart of the Canterbury Tales project was the procession of large puppets, masked performers and musicians. Like the river, it moved through the city – a city that has become an amalgam of destruction and construction – with the half destroyed cathedral as its destination. Members of the community brought to life these hybrid spaces, engaging with the different sites and triggering different tales. In this, lines between performers and audiences were broken through, as we should all be active participants in the making of our city and need to take new ownership of our place.

In this way, this city-within-a-city built around Canterbury tales began with the people and was developed around rituals that bring them together; rather than a city built around buildings that people are then asked to inhabit – a socio-economic rationale that is perhaps past its used-by-date and already proving problematic in the many debates and tensions that continue to shake post-earthquake Christchurch.

This performative approach could be seen as a counterbalance to the plans for the city that are designed around large infrastructure projects such as a Convention Centre and Sports Stadium and other more generic constructs of city living.

In any case, what may be needed is the fostering of a sense of kaitiaki or guardianship that makes us actors and not just passive by-standers in the creation of a new city.

Our idea of a transitional city pivots around questions rather than answers. These questions were considered in a symposium that ran as part of the Canterbury Tales project. A larger panel of people involved in the Canterbury Tales project as well as observers and critics discussed what is happening in the city with the idea that observing how it is performing might help effect positive changes. This panel discussion was complemented by a series of site talks by collaborators on site: artists, students and businesses spoke to their collaboration and their observations of the city at this time.

The outcomes of these talks will be collated and presented in a later publication.